Are people more inclined to help strangers when they’ve experienced similar hardships? People who have experienced displacement could be tremendous allies to the newly displaced, but they are relatively understudied. This study explores how people who have experienced wartime displacement respond to refugees fleeing new violence. I prime Serbs who experienced wartime displacement with either (1) their experience of displacement or (2) their ethnic identity. I then measure their altruism toward Syrian refugees traveling the Balkan route. Compared to participants who were reminded of their ethnic identity, participants who were reminded of their displacement were no more generous toward displaced Syrians. In fact, participants who experienced displacement, as well as wartime violence, were more generous toward the refugees when they were reminded of their ethnic identity. These results suggest that shared hardship alone may not necessarily enhance refugee inclusion. The results further suggest that interventions may benefit from calling out the differences between hosts and refugees—in this case, on the dimension of ethnicity. These findings caution humanitarians to construct their interventions with care.

This paper presents a notched ultra-wideband antenna designed to suppress interference from narrowband communication systems. The antenna features a defected ground structure and a stepped microstrip feedline for improved impedance matching and enhanced bandwidth. A bent slot structure is incorporated into the radiating patch to achieve the band-notched characteristic. It has a wide tunable frequency range which allows for flexible adjustment of the notch frequency. Traditional optimization methods, such as numerical analysis, are computationally expensive and inefficient, while heuristic algorithms are less precise. To address these challenges, an improved one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN-IPS) model is proposed for optimizing the bent slot design more efficiently. The trained 1DCNN-IPS model can accurately predict the antenna’s electromagnetic parameters, reducing mean squared error and training times compared to traditional methods. This provides an efficient and precise solution for antenna structural optimization.

This article explores the use of speech representation verbs in Late Modern English. Drawing data from CLMET3.0, it focuses on paralinguistic verbs in narrative fiction texts from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, as in blubbered in ‘“And only last Sunday – afternoon,” Mr. Povey blubbered.’ (CLMET3.0; 1908, Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale). The results show a drastic increase of these verbs, both in tokens and types, across the Late Modern English period, especially in direct speech constructions. I argue that this trend is linked to developing conventions for and experimentation with speech representation in the growth of especially the novel in the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond: the paralinguistic verbs offer a flexible tool for writers not only to structure dialogue, but also to convey stance and hence influence reader interpretation of characters, roles, situations and themes. The results underscore the importance of studying literary texts for understanding the general development of speech representation mechanisms in the history of English.

This article examines how nuclear weapons are depicted in video games. While the literature has explored the social and symbolic meanings of nuclear weapons and how they have been represented in popular culture, existing accounts have not thoroughly engaged with video games. Examining the bestselling game Call of Duty, I show how gameplay narratives contribute to normalising dominant knowledge about nuclear weapons. The overarching argument advanced in this article is that representations of nuclear weapons in video games contribute to legitimising the ongoing possession and modernisation of nuclear weapons. Drawing on feminist post-structuralist theory, I show how nuclear weapons are programmed to be an exclusive item that only the most skilled players can obtain, reinforcing the exclusionary power dynamics sustaining the nuclear status quo. Moreover, I show how game dynamics produce nuclear weapons as a win-condition, and thus a symbol of power and success that reinforces dominant understandings of their military value while masking the horror of killing. Deconstructing the playing dimension of video games, I situate the ludic aspect as a meaning-making system, working synergically with gameplay stories to reinforce dominant knowledge about nuclear weapons. Ultimately, the article draws attention to everyday discursive mechanisms that render a nuclear world possible.

This paper uses the gradual expansion of the European railway network to investigate how this key technological driver of modernization affected ethnic separatism between 1816 and 1945. Combining new historical data on ethnic settlement areas, conflict, and railway construction, we test how railroads affected separatist conflict and successful secession as well as independence claims among peripheral ethnic groups. Difference-in-differences, event study, and instrumental variable models show that, on average, railway-based modernization increased separatist mobilization and secession. These effects concentrate in countries with small core groups, weak state capacity, and low levels of economic development as well as in large ethnic minority regions. Exploring causal mechanisms, we show how railway networks can facilitate mobilization by increasing the internal connectivity of ethnic regions and hamper it by boosting state reach. Overall, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the effects of European modernization on nation building.

What is the role of law in imperial state-building projects? We study this question of historical significance with an empirical focus on Russian arbitrazh (commercial) courts in Crimea. We document the increase in the number of disputes that involve the Russian state and strong pro-government favoritism in court decisions. We also find that arbitrazh courts are used as a check on local political elites. At the same time, our analysis establishes favoritism toward local businesses in disputes with Russian businesses. Most importantly, we highlight that this stick-and-carrot legal politics is not only imposed from above: Local judges who defected to Russia act more favorably than outsider judges appointed from Russia toward the Russian state and businesses, plausibly because local judges want to signal their loyalty. The implication is that imperial legal domination emerges not only through directives from the metropole but also through the everyday contributions of local imperial intermediaries.

Studies on household income and consumption in Southern Europe have primarily focused on rural areas and factory workers. In this study, we aim to incorporate evidence of household income, considering the earnings of all household members and not just the male wage, using the population list of Zaragoza (Spain) from 1924. This population list is the first (and the last) to systematically record the wages of all citizens regardless of their family role or age. Our results confirm that, in 1924, most working-class households still required the labour of women and/or children to meet basic consumption needs (on average, they contributed nearly sixty per cent of the household income). Based on different food consumption baskets, the results also show that, with household income, the majority of working-class families could afford a basic consumption basket but not a nutritionally more complete basket.

In the post-COVID-19 pandemic era, a ‘digital-first’ agenda is being adopted in health/social care services, while digital exclusion has not been fully addressed. People with severe mental illness face profound inequalities at many levels (i.e. social, financial and health). Digital exclusion may further exacerbate some of these inequalities.